This talk reviews the major contributions of Svati Shah’s recently published ethnography, Street Corner Secrets: Sex Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai (Duke University Press 2014). The book challenges widespread notions of selling sex in India by examining solicitation in three spaces within the city that are seldom placed within the same analytic frame – brothels, streets, and day-wage labor markets (nakas) – where women who have migrated to the city may solicit clients for sex work alongside other income-generating activities, such as construction work. Shah discusses access to housing and water, policing practices and violence, and the production of urban space in relation to the idea of sexual commerce. Showing that illicit and licit economic activities are often solicited from the same spaces, the talk will review the book’s arguments that pertain to the ways in which different modes of solicitation are signaled through the time codes that operate within these urban spaces. These differential temporalities of solicitation both produce and are produced by the legal liminality through which landless migrants secure a living in the city.

March 31, 2014REMOVER OF OBSTACLES: GANESH AND THE PERSISTENCE OF MYTHOLOGICAL GENRE IN HINDI CINEMA
Abstract: The mythological, the founding genre of Indian cinema, is one of its most innovative forms. In the colonial period, it promoted nationalist ideals while avoiding censorship through its association with religion and tradition. It is usually thought that the mythological genre declined in popularity in Hindi cinema in independent India, eclipsed by the social which foregrounded new ideas of Indianness, a concern which continued through the Bollywood films about the diaspora and the recent flourishing of the biopic. Yet the mythological, ignored by many writers and critics, who saw the massive success of JSM in 1975 as a freak occurrence, has continued as a popular form in Hindi cinema, notably children’s animated films, up to the present, also flourishing in other media ranging from television, to popular English fiction. This paper looks at Hindi mythological films about Ganesh, the Remover of Obstacles, in the wider context of the evolving genre, discussing his changing image while also examining the nature of his gajatva or ‘elephantness’.